Potiki

by Patricia Grace

Overview

This compelling novel will resonate for people everywhere who find their livelihood threatened by "Dollarmen" — property speculators advocating golf courses, high rises, shopping malls, and tourist attractions. In Potiki, one community's response to attacks on their ancestral values and symbols provides moving affirmation of the relationship between land and the people who live on it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780824817060
Publisher:	University of Hawaii Press, The
Publication date:	03/01/1995
Series:	Talanoa: Contemporary Pacific Literature , #10
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	453,937
Product dimensions:	23.00(w) x 40.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Patricia Grace is the first Māori woman to publish a collection of short stories (1975). Since then she has published three other short story collections, three award-winning novels, and several children's books. Her novel Dogside Story (UH Press edition, 2002) won the 2001 Kiriyama Prize for fiction. She is widely anthologized and translated into more than eight languages, and is considered not only one of the finest writers in New Zealand and the Pacific, but one of the most important writers of the post-colonial novel in English in the world today.

Editorial Reviews

What I enjoy most about the writing of Patricia Grace is the warmth of feeling, the depth, the aroha; the delight in the quirks of people and the poignancy; the sensitivity of the writing and the poetic quality of her descriptions.

Zealandia

Switching between first person and third person, this loose narrative of developers trying to build a resort on Maori land revolves around the family of Roimata Kararaina and her husband, Hemi Tamihana. Although land development is the central theme, Grace, the New Zealand author of several novels and short-story collections, is at her best portraying the lives of her characters, from their daily tasks (eel-fishing and cooking) to the stories they tell-both real hard-luck stories and ancestral myths. While the writing here is often elegant in its simplicity (the first-person sections in particular are beguilingly direct-``I have loved Hemi since I was five,'' Roimata announces by way of introduction) and the information about Maori life intriguing, the plot thread is often buried. Individual segments stand out because of Grace's able descriptions, but liberal use of Maori words such as papakainga and tangi with no explanation (a glossary might have helped) add to the confusion. When the conflict with ``the dollarman'' (their nickname for a Mr. Dolman, who comes to try to convince them to accept a project that includes not only a nightclub and golf course, but also ``trained whales and seals etcetera'') heats up, it moves matters along, but those sharp-edged segments can be disorienting in tandem with all the magical storytelling. This uneasy mix never jells completely, and the saga of native people suffering at the hands of an imperialist oppressor is not especially fresh. (June)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly